05

"SO ARE YOU GOING TO tell me what the hell happened back there?"

Cas doesn't mind cars, so long as the people inside them aren't asking questions he has no interest in answering. He grips the wheel tight enough that his veins have become visible contour lines across the waxen map of his skin. His thoughts have become a vast atlas that he can no longer navigate.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Sam 'call me Harrison' Harrison rolls his eyes dramatically enough that Cas doesn't need to take his own off the road to know he's doing it. A dull headache is still eating away at Cas, not helped by hazy memories of the diner still sending little waves of nausea through him every time his brain decides to replay the events in excruciating detail.

"You don't seriously think I believe that bullshit, do you?" Harrison says with what Cas discerns as a considerable amount of aggression for someone who's supposedly looking out for his mental wellbeing. "I'm not an idiot."

"No," Cas replies with a calm sort of venom as they draw up to a red light. He starts picking at a loose thread on his cuffed sleeve that now sports a noticeably crimson stain. "But what does make you an idiot is if you think I'm going to tell you."

Harrison laughs but doesn't shift his gaze from the road ahead. It's an easygoing laugh; the kind that people trust too easily, only now it's anything but mirthful.

"Would it really kill you to share your thoughts every once in a while, Sinclair?"

A tenuous silence stretches between them. Cas eases the car to a halt at the traffic lights. He doesn't respond.

Harrison looks at Cas, now wary and somewhat skeptical. "Are you on something, Sinclair?"

Wordlessly, Cas looks at his hands locked on the wheel, glowing red under the lights. His voice is distant and somewhat removed from its regular edge as he says, "I wish I was."

"Maybe you are," Harrison says with a crooked smirk that suggests he's probably half joking and wholly oblivious to the fact that Cas isn't. "Waitress spiked your shake back at the diner, probably."

Without warning, as though Harrison's words had opened the floodgate of Cas's subconscious, the memory — hallucination — comes to Cas in stark detail; Harrison draped in the booth seat across from him like he owned the place, tossing easy smiles to waitresses-free coupons for getting your heart broken by Samuel Matthias Harrison. One minute he was a king in his element, the next, he was a boy bleeding liquid darkness.

Cas shivers.

"Hey, light's green."

Staring blankly at the glowing traffic light before him, it takes the sound of the car behind him aggressively blaring its horn to send Cas into action again.

A moment passes before Harrison says "Pull over."

"What?"

"Pull over, asshole."

Cas pulls over, letting the car trundle dodgily into the grass. The car that had been tailing them speeds past, an obscene hand gesture extended from the rolled-down window.

Harrison gives Cas a dour look, "I'm driving us home. You're completely out of it, man."

"I'm fine–"

"Cut the BS, Sinclair, and get your emotionally unstable ass out of that seat."

Cas doesn't argue further and they swap drivers. They don't speak the rest of the way to Iverson College.

- ✧ -

The following morning on the way to his shift at the local cafe, Milo pays Anais a visit in the Greenhouse.

Contrary to what the name suggests, however, the Greenhouse is not a greenhouse, but rather a glorified shed with skylights acting as a greenhouse for all intents and purposes. Anais had even gone to the effort to paint the shed green a few summers ago, though now it's faded to more of a mossy brown with time and age. The Greenhouse, Anais will tell you, is as much a sanctuary for her as it is for her plants; the closest thing a hopeful scientist has to her own laboratory.

The door is ajar when Milo arrives but he knocks on it anyway. He doesn't hear Anais's response, but he does hear muffled voices speaking what he presumes is probably French, which means she has the radio on. He knocks a little louder.

"Come in!"

Milo never fails to be charmed by the Greenhouse. In the same way that he finds himself drawn to the diner, he sees why Anais spends more time in this repurposed shed than her own room.

Every surface is teeming with life. Plants of every imaginable variety from flowers, to succulents to cacti cozied up on shelves. Emerald leaves cover the and the floor and spill out of pots suspended from rafters that Milo has to strategically duck under. As he navigates his way through this self-contained jungle, he finds himself acutely aware that everything around him is alive and breathing in its own strange sense, and he falls in love with it all just a little bit more.

The goddess Antheia, he thinks, would have appreciated this.

The shed is small — not helped by its ever-increasing population of ambitious flora — and so Milo finds Anais sitting cross-legged on a table surrounded by bromeliads (Milo knows they're bromeliads because 'no Milo they're not called 'those spiky things', they have a name dammit'). He watches as she annotates a leaf (which might have been green once but was now a sickly purple) in her busy notebook.

The radio beside her is, as Milo suspected, muttering something in French. He recognises the word 'paysage' from his eighth-grade languages class, though he has no recollection of what it means.

"Anais," he says. "Anais Clara-Louise Ferrand."

Anais, finally acknowledging his presence, looks up.

"Hm? Oh, Milo!" she chirps, closing her notebook with a satisfying snap and pushing herself off the table to make her way towards him, almost knocking an orchid over in the process. "Why didn't you say something?"

"I did. You told me to come in."

"Oh. Yeah I did, didn't I? Sorry, I'm just–" Anais brushes clods of dirt from her yellow jacket before fumbling with the old radio until it goes quiet. "How are you?" she says, her attention now focused on him. "Feeling any better?"

Milo shrugs, "I'm fine. I've been worse."

It's not a lie, but the words still feel like a flimsy excuse to avoid the question. Anais, knowing his full answer is long and not the purpose of this conversation nods regardless.

At the same time that Anais asks, "What are you doing up so early?" Milo asks, "Dawson has a French radio station?"

Anais frowns a little but only for a moment. The way her face creases betrays more bewilderment than any real frustration.

"Someone had to fill the niche," she says without further explanation. "Now answer my question."

"I talked to my mom last night."

"Mhm," Anais hums, folding her arms in her classic I'm listening stance. "Go on. "

"I told her about the migraines... and stuff."

"And what did she say?"

"She's going to need some sage," he says, scratching the back of his neck. "Like, a lot of it."

Anais appraises him, giving him a look that says she knows exactly what Milo needs it for but she's definitely going to make him say it.

"Lenore's decided to pursue a career in botany?" Anais grins, amused by her own joke; a permanent sun, always beaming on everyone in range with her sunshiney rays to ease the tension. "I hadn't imagined her as the gardener type."

Milo manages to give her a paper-thin smile. He falls easily into her trap.

"I'm getting a reading," he tells her. "And I- I'd like you there with me."